August 6, 2007

Well it’s official.Â I have now seriously injured all four of my limbs! A couple of months ago (almost exactly 2), I completely tore my right knee’s anterior cruciate ligament playing soccer as mentioned in a previous post here.Â Anyway, the long wait till the operation was finally over wednesday 2 weeks ago, I went into hospital at the non-existant hour of 7am, and was off to the operating theatre by 9.30am.

When I got in there, they were all talking around me and to me waiting for the anesthetic to kick in.Â I think I was taking a bit long as they told me to take some deeper breaths while holding the mask over my face. 😛 So I stopped talking back then, took a couple of deep swigs, and next thing I know, I was waking up (sorta) in recovery.Â As usual when I have general anesthetics, I woke up shivering, but that was fixed with some blankets.Â Very tired for a few hours obviously.

Anyway, long story short, the op went well, I’m back at work as of today and getting around on crutches.Â Soon enough I’ll be able to ditch those and a massive brace I wear most of the daytimes, then begin the long road of rehab to get back to playing sport again.

Oh, for anyone curious, the “matching pair” is in reference to my left knee which I did 5 or so years ago.Â I’ve also broken both wrists (at separate times). 😀

June 7, 2007

For those that knew and are curious, or those that didn’t but wondered at the title, here’s the story.

Thursday night at indoor soccer, my knee went sideways (ie the whole joint, not just the cap or something). They’re not designed for that. I went to the docs friday, they were concerned about it, I had an MRI scan today, and the letter from there to my doc says I’ve done a complete ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) tear as well as other minor associated injuries to my knee.

The short story is I think it means no strenuous activity for my knees the next year or so and an op in about 5 weeks or so to get the ligament replaced.

I’m a bit sore, a bit annoyed I miss skiing this year – been looking forward to it all year since I went for the first time last year, but otherwise nothing I haven’t done before, so I’ll be right. Catchyas all when I seeya next!

May 15, 2007

For anyone who read and was at all interested in my previous carparking post, it has indeed continued this year. Only a brief update this time. Apparently this time of the year they need access to the side door of the shed where we park our cars, and there was an “official complaint” put in for us to not park there anymore. So we don’t.

It is interesting to note however, that now that we aren’t parking there, other people are. So far in the week or so that we haven’t been there, they have used that side door ONCE, and it wasn’t something they needed the entire parking/driveway area for. In fact, they didn’t. They parked in what would be the 3rd parking spot next to it and just used that. I’ll wait and see if we get to park there again…

Edit (18/6/2007): There’s now big yellow lines across the area where we were parking and it’s marked “Keep Clear”.Â Looks like nobody’s going to be parking there anymore.Â Ah well, it was good while it lasted…2 years. I still don’t get it, but meh, life doesn’t always make sense.

October 3, 2006

Apparently the veins in my right arm are better for getting blood out of than in my left arm. I found this out on friday when I went in to give them some blood for studying and some quality assurance thing. Something to do with me being allergic to eggs still, which is apparently quite rare in an adult. Anyway, they wanted 16 tubes (about the size of the smaller test tubes you get in science classes at school) of my blood for this testing. They looked at the left arm first, it wasn’t much good, so they went for the right arm. We got about 12 tubes out of that one before it stopped enough that they couldn’t fill any more, then went to try the left, and didn’t get even a drop out, so gave up there. Being left handed, I’ve always offered my right arm when needing just a bit of blood for a blood test or something anyway. Now I have a good/legit reason for doing so. 😛

As usual, I watched them the whole way through which apparently is uncommon…most people don’t like watching their blood being taken or injections etc apparently. I find it fascinating. Anyway.

August 28, 2006

This year at church, I got into footy tipping. Not because I’m at all interested in footy, but to prove a point that you don’t need to know anything about it to do well. Anyway, at the start and middle of the season I was doing incredibly badly – at the bottom of the ladder. Lately I’ve been doing better coming in the top 5 in the comp (there’s a bout 25 of us in it) each week, and I’m now just above middle of the ladder, so I do believe my point was made.

Now this (being the final week) I’d like to prove another point. It’s just as hard to get them all wrong as right. My logic is that to try and get them wrong, you have to work out who you think is going to win, and then pick the other team, so that’s what I intend to do. I wanted a written dated record to say that it is deliberate that I’m getting them wrong this week, and had I been tipping properly, my score would be the opposite of what it will be, so here goes…

Edit: I got 1 out of 8 tips that I tipped the winning team, therefore I picked 7 correctly. I reckon that’s point made.

June 13, 2006

On sunday night had a few friends over for dinner & DVDs. I decided to cook for a change and make something decent rather than just ordering pizza or something equally as boring, so sunday afternoon off to the shops I went. My first stop was Leonard’s Lenard’s Poultry as they have all sorts of fancy chicken stuff, which is good, but they were shut, so I went to the butcher nearby instead. Then I went to the supermarket to pick up a few more ingredients, and then headed home to prepare.

First/easiest to prepare was the chocolate dish (yes, that’s right – an entire dish of chocolate of various varieties). This consisted of dairy milk, caramello, and mint triple decker chocolate in the middle, then some caramel Tim Tams, then some Mint Slice biscuits around the outside – it looked (and smelled/tasted) really nice! This was for dessert.Second to prepare was a salad. Ingredients were lettuce, carrot, a tiny tomato (we weren’t big fans, but needed colour), cucumber, cheese, and strawberries. Apparently it’s not normal to put strawberries in salads, but I thought it looked good and they tasted good too. Put all that in a bowl, mix it round a bit, and voila – salad!

For the main course I cooked chicken kievs and turkey kebabs and garlic bread. I was a bit concerned while the kievs were cooking coz they were leaking a bit, but in the end they turned out perfect.

End result – all the food was perfect, and tasted great too. I’ve got photos of the salad and chocolate (not that great quality, and forgot to photo the rest) which I’ll post here when I find them.

I didn’t hear of any reports of food poisoning from the people that were there, so I think the synopsis is that I can cook!

June 9, 2006

Well it’s been ages, but I’ve now got something noteworthy to write about. Had some more tests for my egg allergies yesterday. The short version is I’m still allergic. There you go – story over.

The long version: Went into the hospital yesterday morning for my egg allergy “challenge”. This basically consists of them (the doctors) creating this egg-milkshake mix, and feeding it to me in gradually increasing doses (at 15-20min intervals) up to the point where I have as much as would be contained in a normal meal with egg as a non-primary ingredient.

The doses were 5mL, 10mL, 15mL, 25mL, 50mL, 100mL. Anyway, so they plugged me into a few machines to make sure I didn’t die or anything, and put an IV thing in the back of my hand in case they needed to get something into my blood quickly. That in itself was fun – I think the doc was a little nervous – on his first shot he missed the vein, so had to go to the other hand. I’ve probably had more of those things than he’s given, so that was ok. Anyway, a few mins later, on to the doses.

After the first one I was mostly ok – just a bit of irritation in my throat which went away after 5 mins, and apparently some redness on my neck (a bit hard for me to see, but they said that). 10mL upto 25mL was all no symptoms. 50mL I didn’t notice any symptoms, but apparently my face went a bit red, and neck too. They decided to continue with the last dose as it wasn’t killing me and we were so close.

So I took the 100mL does, and all was well for the next 15 mins, so the doctors wandered off to do their doctorey thing and leave me to wait and make sure I didn’t die. Anyway, about an hour later my eyes were getting all puffy and my face a bit too – was a bit disconcerting. About the same time, the doctor came back, and he’s like “Ooh, a positive reaction! We don’t often get these!” So I was treated like a celebrity for the next half hour or so, twas pretty fun – all the attention from the nurses and doctors 😉 The nurses were like “Normally these are so boring and nothing happens.”

Anyway, by then, the doctor decided it was probably not gonna go away quickly, and they should do something about it, so they gave me an adrenalin injection, and that made the puffy face etc go away. Unfortunately, because it got to that stage, I had to sit and wait for another 4 hours to make sure I didn’t get any other delayed reactions, so it was a full day event by the end of it.

March 3, 2006

I’ve been looking for something to put here that people will find interesting that is applicable to be posted on a public website. Anyway, these past few days we’ve had a somewhat amusing car parking drama here at work, so I’ll fill anyone that reads this in on that.

Basically, where I work is short on officially marked carparking, so a few of us park across the road next to this huge storage shed. Now, there’s an access door that opens on to next to where we park, so we make sure to always leave one car’s space free in case they want to access the shed through that door. We’ve been hear nearly a year now, and only once have they needed to get in there (there’s other doors to the same shed). So that’s the scenario.

Anyway, 2 days ago, someone pulled up in a big 4wd ute thing, and put notes on my car and one of my colleagues’ car too basically saying “Please don’t park here as it may inadvertently cause damage to your vehicle.” The note was dated as being modified in 2004!Â It was signed by the campus property services manager, but was basically a photocopy of this form from, as I said earlier, 2004. (I work on a university campus).

Anyway, yesterday my boss had a meeting with this manager, and that was one of the things discussed. He (the manager) said we were fine to park there, and whoever put the notes there wasn’t sanctioned by him.Â So now we’re officially allowed to park there, and if they need to get to the shed they just have to ask us to move our cars. Now, while this meeting was occuring, someone came up with a forklift and dumped a pile of forklift pallete things right behind my car making it impossible for me to get out. We just laughed it off – can’t believe how petty people can be. The campus services manager wrote a quite pointed e-mail to the boss of the person we suspect causing the ruckus, who later came up quite apologetic and had them moved. We’re not 100% sure who put them there, but we have suspicions. Anyway, for now I think it’s resolved, but I reckon there’s a good chance we haven’t heard the last of it yet.

January 9, 2006

Back at work today – I thought I would’ve had a fair bit to do sitting on my desk, but it was all done within 20 minutes of arriving. Spent most of the rest of the day just picking up where I left off and tying up loose ends that weren’t urgent to get done before Christmas. Happy New Year by the way if I didn’t say that yet.